Kyle Veazey: Ten years later, Shaun Micheel copes with 'burden' that came with winning PGA Championship

PGA returns to Oak Hill, site of Micheel's win, this week

Shaun Micheel's career-defining moment was winning the PGA Championship at Oak Hill Country Club in Rochester, N.Y., in 2003. It remains his only PGA Tour victory.

Oak Hill Country Club, Rochester, N.Y., a cloudy early fall day, 2004. Shaun Micheel is there. A year earlier, that's where he won the PGA Championship, one of golf's four major tournaments, with a flourish capped by that famous 7-iron from 175 yards to two inches on the last hole.

So here, on this day, for this outing, he's a celebrity. He stands on one tee all day, hitting with every group that comes by. When the day ends, and before a scheduled dinner that night, he asks if there remains time to head out to 18, just for giggles. Certainly, he's told.

There, at the top of the hill, he discovers a plaque in the fairway from where he hit his shot. It made him pause, made him reflect, made him think about how, in many ways, his life changed there that day.

It was the storybook day for Micheel, the Memphian who made his way up pro golf's ladder and was unknown to all but a few before that weekend. The PGA Championship returns to Oak Hill beginning Thursday, providing symmetry between course and round number — it's been a decade since Micheel's victory shocked golf.

It has not been a storybook 10 years since that day. Sure, Micheel has amassed some $9 million on the Tour, cashing big paycheck after big paycheck in the Tour's era of excess. Yet he has endured struggles — his 2008 shoulder surgery, his public struggle with low testosterone, his mother's death from cancer in 2010. He no longer has full status on the PGA Tour; his status as a "past champion" places him in No. 32 of the Tour's 36-category list of exempted players it uses to fill its fields, meaning he gets into events when the fields are relatively weak or if he receives a sponsor's exemption.

The 2003 PGA, the day he outplayed Chad Campbell and beat a field that included 96 of the world's top 100 players, remains his only Tour-level win.

"There were a lot of things that came with it, and the pressure to excel at the highest level every week just kind of got to me," Micheel said one morning last week from Reno, Nev., where he was to play a practice round in advance of the Reno-Tahoe Open, a PGA Tour event that's overshadowed by a World Golf Championship tournament the same week.

He has infinite memories of the 2003 PGA. "We could go on and on about them," he said. Of the last shot, of course. Of finishing high enough in the Greater Hartford Open a few weeks earlier to even get in. Of arriving to the course hoping just to make the cut. Of one late night, his six-months-pregnant wife Stephanie in the passenger seat, trying to find a pharmacy in Rochester to find her some heartburn medicine.

Of course, the 7-iron. "I guess that's, maybe, the first thing," he said. From 162 yards to the front of the green, then 13 more to the flag. Up a stroke on Campbell, Micheel essentially needed to get on the green, two-putt, then hope there wasn't a playoff. Micheel hit first.

Thwack. Micheel's 7-iron came down sharply, ground asplatter, almost as if he chunked it.

"Be right," Micheel yelled, eyeing his shot, seeing it head straight for the flag. The crowd's murmur picked up.

The ball landed with a bounce on the green about 10 feet short, then took off on a beeline to the hole. The crowd went from murmur to roar.

The ball stopped two inches from the cup; Micheel gave a full right-arm pump. He was a major champion.

"Add that one to PGA Championship lore," Nantz said.

Micheel would tap in and soon hoist the absurdly large Wanamaker Trophy. His two-handed hug of the silver chalice remains the first thing that comes up in a Google image search for his name.

Mixed results, mixed emotions

"I could lay on my couch and share a couple of hours of feelings I've had about things that have happened over the past 10 years," he said.

They aren't all bad, even though a half-hour conversation with Micheel, his tone and frank willingness to talk about his setbacks and his struggles, might convince you they are.

He finished ninth at the Players Championship, the so-called fifth major, a year after his PGA win, a season in which he made 20 of 27 cuts and finished in the top 25 eight times. He finished second at the 2006 PGA, though he was four shots off the lead after the third round and finished five shots back of the man who won everything he was leading at that time in his career, Tiger Woods. He had three top-10s in 2007, including a near-win at the Viking Classic outside of Jackson, Miss., a chance lost when he double-bogeyed the 71st hole.

All the while, he carried something of a mental block.

"I think it changed me a little personally because I just have always felt — how am I going to upstage this PGA? How am I going to keep this thing going?" Micheel said. "I remember early on, I just felt like I was always being judged. And that's really on me. There were financial rewards that come with that, but there's a lot of pressure that comes that way, too."

Physical limitations had their part, though. Micheel learned not long after the PGA that he suffered from low testosterone and began taking a medication to supplement his natural levels. His quest to get a medical exemption once the PGA Tour banned the substance "just nearly drove me out of the game," he told ESPN in 2009.

In 2008, after missing the cut at the then-Stanford St. Jude Championship, he underwent shoulder surgery and didn't return to competition until the next March. Though he had a successful 2010, motivated in part by his mother's battle with cancer, his game has not quite been the same since. His driving isn't nearly what it used to be; he has since learned that he can't replicate the swing he had before his shoulder surgery. He's spent so much time practicing "that I've kind of forgotten how to play," meaning the mechanics have occupied more space in his head than the whole game, the road map to win tournaments.

"He has a very introspective side of him that keeps his juices flowing, keeps that competitive edge," said Phil Cannon, the executive director of the FedEx St. Jude Classic, where Micheel has played 20 times. "He desperately wants to not only play good but win again on the PGA Tour — and I don't doubt that he will."

Micheel knows he has 5½ years until he's eligible for the 50-and-older Champions Tour. He continues to work; he convinces himself he needs to have a good attitude. He loves the game too much to want to do anything else.

"Let's put it this way: I haven't started looking for another job," he said.

Remember, his wife was six months pregnant with their first child when Micheel won his tournament. "I get asked quite often by my two kids when I'm going to win another trophy," he said. "And the pressure of having to answer that is really difficult."

When they travel with him to an event, they spend days in the Tour's day care. They love it there. So much so that when their dad comes to pick them up after Friday's round, they're disappointed if they find out they don't get to come back the next day.

"They understand what it is to miss a cut," Micheel said.

Heading back to Oak Hill

At practice ranges recently, Micheel has been cheating. It isn't one tournament at a time for him. He's been envisioning some of the holes at Oak Hill, how they set up, and what kind of shots he'll need to play them — even if he's on the range at Reno or Jackson or wherever else.

"I would say I'm extremely nervous about next week," said Micheel, who has a place in the field as a past champion. "Just going back and seeing the clubhouse and kind of reliving some of the memories that happened that week — and there were a lot of great ones. I'm a little bit apprehensive. I've been working hard on my game."

But back to 2004, when Micheel asked to revisit Oak Hill's 18th. It was something of a setup. A couple of dozen Oak Hill members in their carts were ringing the green. He pulled out his 7-iron, just like he did more than a year earlier, and swung.

This time, without the late-Sunday adrenaline, it landed about 10 yards short.

It has happened so often since, an everlasting mark of Memphis left at one of the country's most prestigious golf courses.

"Just about anybody who plays the hole, certainly the guests (try the shot)," Craig Harmon, the Oak Hill pro, said. "There are plenty of divots there where people have tried that shot."

Tried, and failed, most likely, at least compared with that high bar Micheel set a decade ago — both for the shot, and for himself.